Feeding A Hundred

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." -Mother Teresa

Next to Thanksgiving, Christmas is the time of year when people seem to gorge themselves the most. Ham, apple cider, gingerbread, fruitcake, eggnog, candy canes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, nuts, custard, pie... Is your mouth watering yet? The holiday season seems to be the time to eat, and as Christmas Eve approaches, I'll be spending less time on the internet and more time in the kitchen. But not everyone is so lucky as to gorge themselves on my sugar-tabasco pickles or sweet potato souffle.

In fact, there are about 852 million people in the world this Christmas who will go hungry. 852 million. You and I cannot possibly feed 852 million people... But the World Food Program can. Or at least, they can try.

If you want to join me in helping the WFP feed those starving mouths, there is a very simple way to do it: click the title of this post ("Feeding a Hundred") and it should link you to freerice.com's Toolbar Installation page. Or you can simply click here: http://freerice.com/toolbar.php?utm_source=lp_banner Downloading this toolbar is free and easy, and for every five searches you run, freerice.com sponsors donate 2,500 grains of rice to hungry people; it takes almost no time and very little effort.

Of course, through the toolbar, you can only donate up to 5,000 grains a day. If you're interested in contributing more, or just don't want another toolbar cluttering up your internet page, you can spend a little more time earning rice by playing the games at freerice.com. There, you donate as much rice as you want by submitting correct answers as you are quizzed on subjects of your choice. Improve your English grammar or vocabulary; learn some Italian, Spanish, French or German words; test your knowledge of geography, basic math, or the periodic table. You can even learn some famous paintings while you're at it.

I've made it a habit to "waste" extra time on the Internet on freerice.com when I'm bored rather than playing FarmVille or browsing bumper stickers on Facebook. If I'm at a loss for something to do, I just head over to Free Rice and start accumulating grains. For me, it's more than reaching some goal before my deadline's up; it's about making the lives of others easier to live, in any small way that I can.

So, Merry Christmas, everyone! Enjoy your holiday meals-- and, maybe, I'll see at FreeRice.com?

"I don't think I can explain this in any way that would make my parents believe me..."

Maybe you've never heard of the worldwide treasure hunting phenomenon that is Geocaching. If so, that's okay; I hadn't heard of it either until I began my 101 in 1001 project. In looking for random, fun things to put on my list of 101 goals, I came across geocaching.com and, without any real understanding of how the treasure hunt worked, slapped it on my list as Goal #86.

Last night, my friends and I finally decided to find out what geocaching is really about. We headed to the website and, after reading up on the details, decided to finally try it out for ourselves: at ten o'clock at night, on one of the coldest winter days on record. Four girls and a boyfriend.

So here's the gist: we each brought an object to place into the "cache" that we would make. I brought a ring and a bouncy ball; my friends put in eyeliner, and an oversized stuffed fish that probably shouldn't have been able to fit in such a small container, among other random objects we had found lying around. We closed our cache, which was, by decree of geocaching.com, an airtight, waterproof container. We were then ready to hide our geocache, but that wasn't all we would do: we were also going to find some hidden treasure of our own.

Now, geocaching is set up to work by GPS. The coordinates of each cache is recorded online, and it's cachers jobs to find the containers hidden at each location. When you find it, you can take something out, but you have to put something else in to replace it. Then you put it back in its hiding spot and let some other cacher find it. The key to finding the cache is the GPS coordinates, because while the geocache may be hidden, the GPS lets you know that you're looking in the right spot. Our only problem was that last night, we didn't have a GPS with us.

We ran around for hours in the dark, trekking across busy highways and deserted parks in search of the "sketchy door" where the cache we were finding was supposedly located. We nearly got arrested not once, not twice, but three times as we waved our flashlights into gaping holes in the ground shouting, "Is that the box?" We stopped at green lights and ran from strangers and dashed into oncoming traffic and jammed out to music and made illegal u-turns and waved to hobos and finally, finally found the box. Or rather, film canister.

And it was empty.

All right, fine. Not empty. But all it had was a list of the people's names who had found the box before us. Somehow, we weren't disappointed. We were just happy that we had found our box.

And so as we replaced the canister and hid the geocache of our creation, there was a spirit of triumph in the air. And then my friend Frenchie turned to me and said with a laugh, "I'm sorry my fish was too big."